For those of you in the MOBA gaming scene, DOTA 2 is on now and it is huge news.
For those of you who get to this article on time, you can check out the tournament here. The DOTA tournament is taking place at GamesCom in Germany. This is a large and prestigious convention.
So far we are seeing a ton of Zephyr, the Windrider. We’re also seeing a few teams pick Beastmaster. As far as gameplay, it plays just like DOTA 1 as you might expect. However we also saw some very unorthodox picks such as Enigma.
Even bigger news is that those with Steam have an opportunity to get in on this early DOTA 2 beta. You can sign in through Steam and click the “get on the list” button while supplies last. This is big news for anyone addicted to MOBAs like I am personally.
For those of you unfamiliar with the game, you can check out screenshots and videos at DOTA 2’s official Steam page. DOTA is the grandaddy of this style of game and has quite some clout in the genre.
So far the graphics are definitely an improvement over the original DOTA. This is to be expected because this version is on the Source engine. We can only expect even more improvements to the graphics later on.
So now you know why it is significant, but what does DOTA 2 mean for the industry? Well the main thing is that it is going to start a whole new war in Multiplayer Online Battle Arena genre. DOTA 2 will be almost instantly kill the struggling Heroes of Newerth and will then proceed to duke it out with League of Legends.
These games have millions of players, some individually. This is an untapped market for Valve and if they win the second major MOBA war, then they win big. For reference the first one was HoN vs LoL, and HoN lost that one. We will keep you posted on the DOTA 2 situation as it develops.
